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Re: [IRCA] [NRC-AM] On the nature of DX Alerts
- Subject: Re: [IRCA] [NRC-AM] On the nature of DX Alerts
- From: Earl Higgins <earlthenut@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 19:07:03 -0800 (PST)
You are a true statesman, gentleman and a scholar Scott, and I don't think any of us could have said it better. I agree with your summation 100%.
I'm saddened to hear of Lisa's hospitalizations, and I want you to know my thoughts and hopes are with you!
Just one minor comment, my impression wasn't so much that Paul was calling Gary in order to preserve the sanctity and purity of the AM band, it was more a simple case of Paul not wanting to see a friend's reputation be sullied in any way. Trust and integrity are something we all work very very hard to maintain, and is so easy to let it slip through your fingers. What's that they say, integrity is something you earn by the inch and lose by the mile?
Sincerely,
Earl Higgins
RX-321 and 15 m end fed wire thing outside
St. Louis, Missouri, USA (W 90.32 N 38.65)
________________________________
From: Scott Fybush <scott@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: Mailing list for the International Radio Club of America <irca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; am@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2012 8:24 PM
Subject: Re: [NRC-AM] On the nature of DX Alerts
I'm just catching up with the list here - Lisa's on her third
hospitalization in three months, so I haven't had much time for DXing or
for broadcasting lately.
A few thoughts from this end:
I think everyone in this very productive and civil conversation has a
good point to make. As DXers, we want to have a way to notify each other
of unusual conditions without having a "Heisenberg effect," if you will,
causing that observation to change what we're observing. Saul is quite
correct that some DXers will hesitate to post to a DX tip list if they
know that the result will be an immediate notification to the station
being observed that it's operating outside parameters. And as DXers, we
have no particular obligation - certainly not a legal one, and only very
questionably a moral one - to let stations know they're out of tolerance.
At the same time, Paul's quite right, too, that we can be a little
irrational sometimes in our attitude toward out-of-normal operation:
it's fun to log a station like KHMO, normally a law-abiding signal, if a
rare glitch causes it to be running day pattern at night...once. But
it's no fun at all to have a KRHW or a KRXR blasting away night after
night on day facilities.
And of course as a broadcaster, I'm in general agreement with Paul and
Gary Glaenzer (who's a friend of mine, too) that we strive to operate
legally at all times. If I'm out driving at night and I hear WXXI on the
west side of town when I shouldn't, yeah, of course the first call I'm
going to make is to master control to make sure we're on night pattern.
But having said that, I think that even as a broadcaster, I'm not sure I
personally would have reacted to the DX-tip post as hastily as Paul did.
It's not as though it's 1937 and the FCC is actively monitoring the AM
band at night for out-of-tolerance stations. The Commission itself has
made it abundantly clear through its enforcement actions, or lack
thereof, that nighttime operation on the AM band is now largely up to AM
stations themselves to police. I can't recall the last time I saw a
citation issued for one-time night operation with day facilities. The
only stations that get busted these days, and only inconsistently, are
those that abuse the rules on an ongoing basis and, in the process,
cause interference to another station that's sufficiently motivated to
complain about it.
Even then, it can be hard to get the FCC's attention. There's a daytimer
on 1370 in Pennsylvania that tends to leave its day power running all
night on a routine basis, nibbling away at our night coverage here in
Rochester, but years of complaints have done little to get it to stop.
So if the FCC manifestly doesn't care about the pollution of the AM band
(and Canada cares even less; it was CHOK's former sister station CKTY
1110 that was notorious for day-pattern operation at night all through
the 1990s!), do I as a little cog in the broadcasting wheel feel so
personally motivated to protect the sanctity and purity of the sacred
medium-wave spectrum that I'm going to go out of my way to let an
engineer know within minutes of a DX-tip list posting that his station
is being heard where it shouldn't?
Unless it's especially egregious - say, it's the 1080 in Buffalo
blasting away during a Red Sox playoff game on WTIC <g> - I think my
instinct in a case like that would probably be to see what beers are
cold in my fridge, pop a cold one, check out the last period of the
Sabres game on TV, and then maybe a couple of hours later I might drop a
"hey, did you know your pattern didn't switch" line to the engineer in
question...if you get my drift.
The good guys like Gary will be certain to make sure it doesn't happen
again the next night, and they're not going to face any FCC consequences
as a result. The bad actors...well, we know as DXers who they are, and
if they're causing real harm to other stations, karma will catch up to
them sooner or later, with or without our assistance.
s
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